All Chapters of Carrying His Claim: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

I woke before dawn, which rarely happened to me after a first session. Usually I slept the deep, dreamless sleep of a body that had done its job and settled, the same way I imagined athletes slept after a race, spent, satisfied, uncomplicated. Instead I lay in the grey early light staring at a ceiling that wasn’t my own, running the same handful of facts through my head like I was trying to make them add up to something more ordinary than they felt.Adrenaline. That was the first word I reached for, lying there. High-stakes contract, unfamiliar household, the largest payout of my career riding on a nine-month arrangement I’d signed only days ago, of course my body had responded with more intensity than usual. Novel circumstances produced novel reactions. That wasn’t mysterious. That was simply biology doing what biology did under pressure.I got up before I could examine the explanation too closely, because examining it too closely felt like exactly the kind of unprofessional indulgen

I’d started attending the communal dinners more out of habit than obligation by the second week — not because I’d warmed to the ritual exactly, but because avoiding it felt like conceding ground I didn’t particularly want to concede. Marguerite’s comment on my first night had cost me something. I wasn’t inclined to let it cost me a whole hall as well.It had gotten easier, in fairness, over the days since. Dessa had taken to saving me a seat near her end of the table without being asked, and a handful of other pack members had warmed by small, ordinary degrees — a nod in the hallway that had once been a stare, a question about my work asked with genuine curiosity instead of thinly veiled suspicion. I’d started to believe, cautiously, that Ottilie’s advice from that first week might actually hold. Give it time. Most of this pack wasn’t Marguerite.The dining room was fuller than usual that evening — some visiting matter I hadn’t been briefed on, a handful of unfamiliar faces mixed in a

The pack settled, by degrees, over the following week — not back to normal exactly, but into a version of normal that had learned to hold its breath a little more carefully than before. The wounded warriors recovered under Ottilie’s care, one of them well enough by the fifth day to sit up and complain loudly about hospital food, which felt, oddly, like the clearest sign yet that the crisis had genuinely passed. Patrols tightened but didn’t panic. Dinner conversation found its way back to ordinary things, even if the ordinary things now carried a faint undercurrent none of them had needed before the horn sounded that night.I found Kieran in the courtyard garden on a grey afternoon nearly a week later, which surprised me enough that I nearly turned around before he noticed me. I hadn’t taken him for a man who spent idle time anywhere as unstructured as a half-wild garden, and yet there he was, sitting on the low stone wall near the old fountain, no folder in hand, no Gideon at his shou

I let three days pass before I called her, which was, in itself, a tell I should have paid closer attention to. I usually called Petra every couple of days without much thought behind the timing — a habit built from years of running a business together, checking in on clients, catching each other up on the mundane logistics of two lives that had grown thoroughly intertwined. Three days of silence, for us, was unusual enough that I suspected she’d have noticed even if I hadn’t eventually broken it myself.“There she is.” Petra’s voice carried the particular warmth she used when she was pretending not to have been slightly worried. “I was starting to think Ashwood had swallowed you whole.”“Just busy. Checkups, pack business, the usual.” I settled into the window seat in my room, the one that had become my preferred spot for these calls, and tried to make my voice sound like the words were the whole truth. “How’s the practice?”“Fine. The Renwick account’s fully closed out, final paymen

The Kindling Rite passed the way Selene had promised it would — quieter than I expected, more moving than I’d prepared for. The pack gathered in the great hall after supper, the ordinary chatter of dinner giving way, by degrees, to something hushed and reverent as the senior members took their places nearest the hearth. I stood beside Selene near the back of the gathered pack, rosemary bundle warm in my palm, and watched names spoken into the firelight one after another — the elderly, the lost, a warrior’s newborn daughter, a mother’s worry for a son gone quiet since the last incursion. When my turn came I spoke my grandmother’s name and felt something old and grieved settle, briefly, into something closer to peace than I’d expected a stranger’s ritual to offer me. Kieran caught my eye once, across the hearth, and didn’t look away for longer than was strictly comfortable. I told myself, walking back to my room that night, that I’d navigated my first real test of pack belonging without